


in the hollows of your arms (i am lost)

by iskra (kiira)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, blood cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 04:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2953043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/iskra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the feel of her blood on your hands has never been so sweet</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the hollows of your arms (i am lost)

She is bird hollow under your finger and hope is something for her sisters now.

It only takes a few moments to gather up her belongings: a scarf, a coat (the seasons changed while you were huddled over microscopes, something close to desperation on your tongue), and bottles and bottles and bottles of pills. Alison had brought a soft knit hat and eyes that cried of sacrifice (you nod your thanks and try to ignore the sick feeling in your stomach, the reminder that blood is staining your hands.)

(Alison’s blood spills out of her lungs and you apologize to her stuttering heartbeat.)

/

Cosima wants to go to San Francisco, so you go.

A plane ride and twenty minutes in the car, you’re in a huge DYAD apartment and she looks at you with hollow eyes because (she knows, of course she knows).

But her shoulders tremble with a cough and then there’s blood on the spotless hardwood floor, on the wall, on your button up white top. There shouldn’t be this much blood in a person, but it paints her lips a mocking red (her teeth glistening; her eyes) and you remember quite mechanically as you wipe blood off your cheek that the average person has 5.5 liters of the stuff pumping through their body.

(You wonder how much Cosima has left.)

The pretty new apartment is stained already; you lead Cosima out and throw the key down a drainage grate and call the first number on the side of a building (CHEAP! CALL TIM!)

There’s only one room but Cosima’s breath rattles a little less and the feel of her blood on your hands was never so sweet.

/

Some days are somehow better; you pretend you’re on vacation, on a honeymoon, on an anything but a funeral. Cosima smiles at you (you’ve learned to wear black; blood stains don’t show up so much) and she puts on her blood red lipstick.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” she says with a grin, and your laughter sticks in your lungs, Alison’s knit beanie snug against her scalp. It’s winter, and you never thought California to be cold (your childhood in the mountains trained you well), but the damp is smothering, sinking into your hair and skin and breathing (it’s becoming wet and soft; everything smudged around the edges).

You’ve asked Cosima if she’d rather move somewhere dryer, but she looks at you with empty, empty, empty eyes and says, “I’m dying, Delphine,” and it’s so fucking final you can’t bear to say it again. She’s dying, and the gooey softness of the rain may do it faster but at least, you reason, at least she’ll be happy.

/

It’s two months since you walked out of the hospital and you’re out to dinner, Cosima’s hands trembling as she tries to eat her pasta.

She was a proud creature once, but that has been bleed out of her (you eat your dinner and try to ignore Cosima’s shaking hands; you take another sip of your wine; it is red and warm as it courses through your veins, a sad mockery of blood).

“Fuck this,” she hisses to her pasta, and gets up to leave, knocking your wine all over the tablecloth, blood wine blood dripping onto your lap, onto the floor, into your eyes, your heart.

“Shit, Delphine, I’m sorry,” and you smear the blood on your hands (wash the wine from your palms).

You leave with her, taking her hand and you don’t know where your guilt begins and her life ends.

/

The third month is oxygen and middle of the night coughing fits and (you wash the sheets four, five times a week at the Laundromat down the street and the tiny Russian lady who owns it gives you suspicious glares every time; you pretend you don’t speak English and try to scrub Cosima’s blood clean).

Sarah visits during one of Kira’s school breaks and Kira is so fucking alive you feel bile rise in the back of your throat (Sarah and Cosima don’t even look like sisters anymore; Cosima could be thirteen years old, tiny and bony and so so tired).

“Delphine,” Sarah tells you one morning before Cosima wakes up, “You don’t have to… to do this alone. Come back,” and you’re so damn tempted to. But the thing is, Cosima died to DYAD in that lab so many months ago, and you don’t know if she’d even survive the trip.

You can’t get the words out and Sarah softly pats your back, her hands soft pale flesh.

/

It’s not fast.

It’s not fast and she takes thirty-four hours and twenty-six minutes to die.

She takes four months, six days, ten hours and twenty-six minutes to die.

(She takes twenty-nine years, eleven months, three days and seven minutes to die.)

There’s _so much_ blood and you have lived with her for what seems like an eternity but you will never get over the abject horror of the blood drowning your hands and her mouth and the sheets and the sheets and the sheets. You hold her in your arms (she shakes, you know distantly that she’s having a seizure), you hold her in your arms and you are baptized again and again and again in her warm, choking blood.

“It’s okay, darling,” you whisper, and she makes a small noise into your arm, an agreement, maybe.

(A lie, you both know, but it’s easier; and isn’t that just how the two of you were?)

She has no grand last words, because that’s not how it fucking works. They never tell you in the movies how horrible death is, how truly horrible, how it smothers like a shroud over everything and _chokes_ (she looks at you four hours before it ends and whispers, “I can’t feel my hands,” and she doesn’t speak again).

And in the moment it seems like any other moment (like any other nightmare of a moment): she takes a breath, it shudders, her body seizes and she quite simply never moves again.

/                                                                                                 

You bury her alone on a Wednesday morning. The sun burns bright and warm, and you turn to marvel over it with Cosima before you remember. You cry for the first time, and it feels like something is trying to tear its way out of your lungs.

/

Three days pass and you call Alison. She cries (she coughs).

You hang up.

/

San Francisco lies heavy on your lungs like grief, like _I can’t feel my hands_ , but her smile glittered here, (you can’t bear to leave her grave forgotten, cold.)

You pass the building where she died; your hands glisten with well-intentioned guilt (her blood is forever warm between your fingers.)

**Author's Note:**

> i will return to your regularly scheduled carmilla after the beep


End file.
